BBC reading list and women
In a facebook note, Gilli published a BBC "Nation's most beloved novel" reading list, out of which people will have read less than 6 books. I could criticize the literary taste, or rather lack thereof, apparent in the list, including The De Vinci Code, for an instance, but what I found notable is actually one of the comments. Some guy commented, claiming that the list is baised for women. His reasoning was based on the fact that the list includes 3 Jane Austens (only one of which is worthy of such a list in my opinion), and "Anne of Green Gables" (a classic, too many of those were missing). A brief counting showed that the list included merely 21 books written by women, a fifth of the list, excluding many worthy authors. In other words, not only wasn't it biased for women, quite the opposite. Research shows that in a conversation between a man and a woman, 40% of the conversation time, at most, will be taken by the woman, and yet, in those cases in which this maximum is reached the man ends up claiming that the woman took over the conversation. It seems to me quite a parallel case. Just a fifth of the list has to be taken by woman in order for someone to jump and scream bias. One could say that it's just a random jerk, unfortunately I tend to believe that these random jerks are most of the population.